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Resouling can manifest in countless ways. Let’s examine a small yet diverse sampling.
In 1903, a sixty-five year-old John Muir went on a camping trip with the president of the United States, Theodor Roosevelt. Muir was Roosevelt’s guide to the grand and rugged wilderness in and around Yosemite Valley, and his purpose was to convince Roosevelt that Yosemite should be designated by the federal government as a national park. Muir had been exploring Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada mountains for decades, and he never stopped paying attention, never stopped being astonished. And he ceaselessly, passionately told about it, through articles and books, organizations and advocacy.
Yosemite National Park is a testament to the “real world” potential of soul-making. Had John Muir and others not been such exemplar’s of Mary Oliver’s three tenets, Yosemite Valley could easily have gone the way of its neighboring, equally resplendent valley, the Hetch Hetchy, which was damned and turned into a reservoir in 1923.
For our next example, we will need to travel across the Pacific Ocean and back in time to 17th century Japan. The poet Matsuo Basho built upon and revolutionized the venerated art of Haiku, telling of his astonishment in the mundane minutia of life seventeen syllables at a time. Basho was a mendicant poet: despite his renown, he crisscrossed the country ceaselessly and humbly, without pomp or circumstance. He stayed close to the earth, close to beauty and grit and the unexpected. More than three hundred years after his death, Basho’s routes have become pilgrimages, the trees, the streams, the mountains he conversed with through his poetry are revered and protected.
Let’s fast-forward to the present day but remain in Japan, a country whose indigenous, animistic Shinto religion comingled with Buddhism and remains to this day. The queen of decluttering, Marie Kondo, may be seen as a lifestyle guru, but at the heart of her work is a sincere effort to re-soul the home. It is remarkable, and cheering, that a television program reaching millions of viewers features a woman kneeling respectfully to greet and introduce herself to every home that she visits, inviting us to shift our perception of the home from an inanimate building in which we happen to sleep and eat to a place with its own dignity and intelligence, its own soulfulness.
The lives of John Muir, Matsuo Basho, and Marie Kondo point to an aspect of soul making that is so crucial for our desecrated world. We are social creatures: one person paying attention, one person being astonished and telling about it can create a ripple effect, can draw the attention of others to the uniqueness and value of a place, of an ecosystem, of a species. How many humans learned to appreciate the oceans through the wonder of Jaque Custeau, how many reformulated their attitudes towards the great apes through the work of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey? How many have recognized the resplendent beauty of the England’s Lake District after reading William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge? Our astonishment is a gift to be shared. Our astonishment is also a responsibility to be taken seriously, for in it lie the seeds of soul-making.
Do you remember the glancing mention of Ronald Regan and his soul-cutting, soul-denying dismissiveness towards the majestic redwoods? Let’s offer a soul-making corrective.
In 1997, a 23 year-old environmental activist named Julia Butterfly Hill climbed a 1500 year-old redwood tree in Humbolt County, California to save the tree and its surrounding ecosystem from clear-cutting. She remained in the tree for 738 days, enduring all manner of inclement weather and persistent threats and harassment from logging interests.
To siphon the redwoods of soul is quick and easy – an actor turned politician can do it in a thoughtless, offhanded 10 word sentence. To connect with the soul of a single redwood takes time, attention, and sacrifice. But Julia Butterfly Hill’s words and actions have had a ripple effect, they have inspired countless others – her soul-making has propagated soul-making.
Which brings us to another metaphor, another image: soul as the Earth’s immune system. An ensouled world is a resilient world. Immune system against what, you may ask? Against the cancerous growth of an ambitiously expansive ego-consciousness. Cancer cells have forgotten their origins: they have forgotten that they are not other, they are part of: they belong. Cancer cells look at the body as a resource to extract from, not an ecosystem to participate in.
Our de-souling of the world is the product of a sort of cancerous amnesia, a forgetfulness of the great body, Gaia, mother Earth, to which we belong and upon which we utterly depend. To re-soul the world, therefore, is a matter of re-membering, remembering our interconnectivity, remembering the place of our beginning, our origin, our Eden: a place in which we finally and once again belong.
